The design of modern electronic systems is a highly challenging and time-consuming task. The density and complexity of the systems demand that the design process yields functionally correct hardware in a timely and cost effective manner. Careful design consideration is required to ensure proper operation, yet such consideration is too difficult and too time consuming to be viable as current methods do not scale effectively to large electronic systems. That is, detailed design analysis is not practical for designs comprising thousands or even millions of devices. Instead, it is highly desirable to select components from libraries of design components that may then be reused in a wide and flexible range of circuit applications. Components from libraries are used routinely in the design and implementation of electronic systems. Customers may supplement a vendor's design library by providing specialty components meticulously designed to that customer's specifications. Therefore, the ultimate design objective is connecting components from various design libraries functioning properly in the particular systems for which they were selected.
In an electronic system, the operation of a given library component in situ is directly dependent on how and where the component is implemented within the system. A priori knowledge of the actual operation of the component is in many cases not possible because the physical implementation or layout of the component is determined by synthesis constraints and directly influence the system's functionality. The component and its encompassing system must meet or exceed key design and architectural criteria in order to function properly. These criteria typically specify systems that are highly reliable, provide high performance, are power efficient, and may be adapted to a variety of applications areas. Thus the ability of the system to properly function with any implementation of a particular component is critical. As noted, detailed analysis of the library components within the digital system is not feasible due to the exorbitant computational and time costs, so novel, more efficient methods must be used to validate the design and thus ensure that it will operate as specified independently of variations in the implementation of components. These methods must be computationally efficient, cost effective, and sufficiently accurate to provide detail about the operation of the logic cell in situ. Only then will validation of the logic designs be possible.